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In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

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The world was caught off-guard by recent mass movements of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa. But this is not one brief storm to be weathered and forgotten. These mass movements will only continue in coming years as conflict, disasters, extreme poverty, and other hardships displace people from their homes. Today the recent rise in 'survival migration' is commonly cited to justify political upheaval and isolationism in both Europe and the United States.

Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) is a fundamental data collection system for countries and a critical enabler of access to services and participation in civic life for individuals. However, women face unique barriers to accessing CRVS systems, including distance, cost, and regulations that place demands on women for documentation not required from men.

Ann Mei Chang wants to “turn development upside down.” That’s how she describes the aim of the Global Development Lab, the arm of USAID that she runs. The Global Development Lab is tasked with finding new, innovative development solutions, testing them, rolling them out, and then trying to scale them.

The economist who coined the term "BRICS" thinks he has a hot investing tip. In this edition of the CGD podcast, Lord Jim O’Neill of Gatley, a minister in the UK Treasury, tells me that if it costs the world $40 billion over ten years to stop 10 million deaths and “stop the loss of $100 trillion of global GDP, that’s something like a two-and-a-half-thousand percent return.... That seems to me like a pretty good investment.”

Development depends on innovation. New ideas, new funding mechanisms and new technologies save and improve lives, from vaccines to solar lamps to Development Impact Bonds. But even if innovations reach a million people, they still fall short of the billion who live in poverty.

Through its Gender and Development Program, CGD is examining donor institutions’ various approaches to promoting gender equality and tracking gender-related results. Join Senior Fellows Mayra Buvinic and Charles Kenny for the next step in this research area: an event focused on how multilateral banks (MDBs) integrate gender across their operations and measure their gender equality-related impacts.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens future growth and prosperity, as well as health. Without global action, the UK's Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, led by Lord Jim O'Neill, estimates that an additional 10 million people will die every year from drug-resistant infections and the global economy will experience a loss of $100 trillion by 2050. The impact from rising drug resistance will be felt worldwide, hitting low- and middle-income countries hardest.

Not many development organizations can trace their roots to theoretical physics, but it was none other than Albert Einstein who suggested in 1933 that the European-based International Relief Association set up a US branch to help people suffering in Nazi Germany. That branch became the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and today the organization works in more than 40 countries responding to humanitarian crises.

Evidence shows that when women have the opportunity to serve as political leaders, governments are not only more inclusive but also perform better. Women politicians are shown to champion policies improving health services and education systems, and they serve as positive role models influencing girls’ career aspirations and educational attainment. But across the world, women’s rates of political leadership remain lower than men’s. What are the obstacles standing in the way of women’s equal political participation? And what can be done to overcome these obstacles?

A billion premature deaths this century – that’s the estimated toll of smoking. As 80% of the world’s smokers live in low- to middle-income countries, that’s a huge problem for the developing world. So what’s the solution? You’ve heard before from CGD senior fellow Bill Savedoff that increasing tobacco taxes can actually help turn people away from nicotine; on this week’s podcast, you’ll hear another idea.

More people are in need and for longer; that’s the global humanitarian crisis in a nutshell. Just before the World Humanitarian Summit, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim and the IRC's David Miliband discuss the blurring of the line between development and humanitarian response.

The refugee crisis emanating from the Syrian conflict has helped to focus policymakers globally on the broader challenges of populations displaced by conflict. In part, humanitarian responses have fallen short in meeting short term crisis needs. But there is also a growing recognition that long term displacement poses challenges that call for a development-oriented response extending beyond crisis measures. As hosts to large displaced populations, developing countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Kenya have struggled to meet the needs of these populations in a way that also promotes their national development strategies.

With the World Humanitarian Summit looming, and in the absence of a unified global response to the Syrian refugee crisis, the head of the United Nations Development Programme Helen Clark says in a new CGD Podcast that governments and international institutions are shifting their focus from traditional humanitarian relief to more sustainable ways to help millions of displaced people.

It has operations in more than 30 countries worth around $9 billion. And now the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is searching for its next leader. Current president Sir Suma Chakrabarti is seeking a second four-year term as EBRD president, and he faces the challenge of Marek Belka, a former Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Poland and currently president of the country’s National Bank. Recently both candidates recorded interviews with me, which we have edited together into this edition of the CGD Podcast.

Despite major improvements in OPIC’s transparency, there still is no single publicly available dataset that includes comprehensive information about the agency’s portfolio. OPIC has a searchable project dataset, but it only includes very basic information. Digging deeper requires clicking through hundreds of project descriptions (in PDF format), which very few people are willing to do. We built a better, scraped dataset, available now with as a detailed collection of nearly 1,500 OPIC projects over the past fifteen years.

“Transparency has the potential to transform the effectiveness of aid spending,” said UNDP Administrator Helen Clark at a recent CGD event co-hosted with Publish What You Fund to launch its 2016 Aid Transparency Index. For the second year running, UNDP comes out at the top of the index – and in this week's CGD Podcast, Publish What You Fund’s CEO Rupert Simons says that generally, we understand more clearly who gives what to whom and why.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was created exactly twenty five years ago to develop open and sustainable market economies in post-Cold War Europe. Now, its reach extends from Morocco to Mongolia – and its work from agribusiness to equity funds, manufacturing to natural resources, governance reform to financing the green economy. How is the EBRD changing with the times, and how should it respond to the imperatives set by the SDGs, the Paris climate agreement, and to the emergence of new players in development finance?